


clad in black, weeping Eve

by daikonjou



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Gen, Manga Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-03
Updated: 2013-07-03
Packaged: 2017-12-17 13:37:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,032
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/868165
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/daikonjou/pseuds/daikonjou
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ten years later, Jean still carries Marco's bone in his pocket.</p>
            </blockquote>





	clad in black, weeping Eve

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [this prompt](http://snkkink.dreamwidth.org/524.html?thread=855820) on the kink meme.

Cleanup in Trost after the battle was awful. Jean would almost have preferred to have been assigned to mop up stray titans, risking getting eaten if he screwed up, but then he would never have found out what happened to Marco.

It almost wasn't worth knowing, though. Better to have had the detachment of a name on a list, one more line of letters carved into the large stone monument unofficially documenting all the trainees who had survived training only to be killed by titans. Better than finding Marco broken and dead, half of him literally missing, eyes sunken, freckles standing out horribly against his paper-white, bled-dry face.

He shouldn't have done it, but he couldn't bear to leave without something to fill the void where Marco had been, so he snapped off a bit of exposed rib and put it in his pocket before hoisting what was left of Marco up onto the wagon piled high with other bodies. The bone barely weighed anything, but Jean felt the slight curve of it against his hip like a brand as he gathered corpses and identified people he recognized right until the wagon's load (and Marco) were stacked like cordwood and burned on a communal pyre. Overhead, the column of pyre smoke dusted the sky with grey. Jean rubbed his eyes against the soft, hot rain of ash. Not because he was crying.

Later, he carefully washed the finger's length of bone and turned it over in his hands, over and over. He put it away in his pocket again when he found himself rubbing the outside curve of it with his thumb. The stench of death was never going to leave him, or the stinging in his eyes when the thought of Marco's smiling face crept up on him. Marco was never going to smile again, he was bits of powdery ash and the rib Jean had taken from him.

Jean put the piece of rib into the pocket of his jacket, on the left side, and gathered his things for a trip to the barracks showers. The stench of death would never leave him, but he could scrub until he was chafed red all over or he couldn't smell it anymore.

-

On the first anniversary of the retaking of Trost, Jean sat on his bunk on the men's side of the Scouting Legion barracks and polished the finger-length of bone from his left breast pocket with a bit of scrap cloth left over from the shirt he'd worn to rags. The bone was a little rough in texture, especially around the ends where the edges were sharp. Occasionally he felt the ends poking against his chest as he rode and worked a 3DMG, even through the fabric of his uniform jacket and his shirt.

"What is that, Jean?" Connie asked, sitting sideways on his desk chair. Not that he really used that desk for much besides writing letters home to his mom he never sent. He wore his stupid (innocent) grin a little less stupidly and innocently, but that was true of everyone who'd survived Trost. Eren was, of course, an exception--that idiot had never had a stupidly innocent grin, just a lot of stupid yelled ambitions about wiping out titans and a girl who was basically his sister and also way too good to be looking out for a loser like Eren.

Never mind that Eren occasionally also turned into a titan. "It's nothing," Jean muttered. He continued polishing. Marco's smile had never been stupid nor totally innocent, he realized. But it had always been warm.

"You're sure paying a lot of attention to it for something that's nothing--hey. Are you crying?"

"Shut up!" Jean rubbed his eyes, polishing rag clenched in a sudden fist. "Shut up."

"It's today, isn't it?" Connie said, instead of pushing it further. "Trost."

_"Shut up."_

Connie got out of his chair and left him alone after that, but that was okay. It wasn't a good day to talk to anyone anyway. Too many people carrying too many personal ghosts.

"It wasn't his fault. That wasn't fair to him," someone said. "It wasn't yours either, Jean. Let it go."

"I _can't_."

"I'm sorry," the someone said, and didn't say anything else.

Jean let the breath he'd been holding hiss out all at once, then put the bone back in his breast pocket. "Me too," he said to the empty air.

-

On the second anniversary of the retaking of Trost, Jean had no time to sit and reflect. He was fleeing through a thick forest propelled by his 3DMG, trees tall and broad enough to block out the sun with their canopies. Sure enough, though, he came within signaling distance of the edge of the main force and flashed a message with the signal beacon he'd been carrying securely strapped to his back. He flashed it a couple more times until someone flashed back "message received," then turned it off and strapped it back on.

It would be a while before the squad minding his horse could round the forest to pick him up, and until then his best bet was staying high enough in the trees to keep the titans from getting to him too easily. Jean picked a sturdy-looking branch and fired his grapples into the tree trunk above it, just high enough that his drop onto the branch was gentle. It held.

Carefully, he sat down and pulled the bone out of his breast pocket. He polished it with the rag it was wrapped in, keeping an ear out for the sounds of a titan getting too close for comfort.

"Do you still blame yourself for not noticing?" someone asked. 

Jean had the bone and cloth back in his pocket and a blade out before he realized he'd moved. He didn't so much as sway when he looked down and found he was standing.

"You shouldn't, Jean," the someone said. "It was chaos. Enough people went missing without anyone being any the wiser."

"I should have!" Jean shouted at the empty air. He winced. This was not how a soldier behaved, at least, not one who who had a vested interest in surviving. "I should have noticed," he repeated, more quietly.

"I don't blame you," the someone said.

"You should," Jean muttered, but the voice made no reply.

When night had properly fallen and the titans had gone dormant for the time being, the collection squad with Jean's mount spread out and signaled an all clear for Jean to climb down and clamber back onto his horse. They returned to the main force after an uneventful ride. 

(The other scouting party that had split off, to the east, had not been as fortunate as Jean's. Only the beacon carrier returned, ashen and with a hasty tourniquet that wasn't holding up to stemming the blood loss from a leg that had been mostly bitten off. It was on the guy's right side, Jean noted with a sick feeling in his stomach. The beacon carrier from the eastern party died while they rode back to human territory, despite the medics' efforts to save him. In the end, tourniquet be damned, the carrier stumbled through his report with an increasingly clumsy tongue before simply closing his eyes and slipping off, as if he'd given up.)

-

Jean spent the third anniversary of the battle of Trost stuck in bed with a nasty fever. The legion quarantined him, encouraged by their new strategist's recommendation. Twice, shaking from chills and tossing and turning from fever (how was it possible to feel so hot but so cold at the same time?), he thought someone tugged the covers over him and pressed a hot/cold hand to his forehead.

"Not yet, Jean," someone said. "Don't go yet. You have too much left to do."

When he fell asleep at last, he dreamed vividly of a specter floating over his bed with Marco's freckles, but the mouth that had turned up in a smile a lot for him was turned down instead, worried. "Marco," he nearly said, but Jean's mouth wouldn't move properly. The mumble that came out wasn't intelligible at all, but his eyes stung and his chest burned.

"Don't cry," the specter said. "It's not your fault, Jean."

The specter only had one hand, its left, and in the wreckage of the right side of its body was missing a rib.

Jean woke himself screaming, and couldn't stop until someone held him down and the bright, sharp prick of a needle and the peculiar discomfort of an injection ushered in darkness.

-

The fourth year, the Stationary Guard's commander (old man Pixis, who somehow hadn't dropped dead or been killed, despite all efforts by the titans and politics to the contrary) stopped by the Scouting Legion's headquarters with a shipment of booze. Commander Erwin said nothing, though Lance Corporal Levi scowled visibly and announced that "brats who can't control themselves when it comes to alcohol shouldn't be drinking any of it, and if one shitty greenhorn throws up on the floor I will make you fucking clean it up with your tongue." He punctuated the comment with a glare. Some of the new recruits quailed visibly.

Commander Pixis had rather more encouraging things to say, to a certain degree, but Jean tuned it out and filled a glass from the broached cask in the shipment.

"Congratulations on the promotion, Squad Leader Kirschstein," Mikasa said. She wasn't drinking.

"Mikasa," Jean said. "I…" He swallowed. Her looks still left him stunned, even after four years of violence and grief and all the times she and Armin had nearly lost Eren. Then again, with Mikasa one could never tell where the new violence and grief had set in. Her eyes were always cold and hard, and only ever seemed to thaw a little with Armin and Eren. "Thanks. You seem well." Right now they were maybe a degree warmer than they had been when they'd confronted Braun and Huber.

"You're doing better," someone said, in the background, voice fuzzy like it was being drowned by the hum of too many people talking at once. "I'm proud of you, Jean."

Jean blinked against the sudden blurriness in his sight. "How's Eren?"

"He's fine," Mikasa replied, with an edge that said _we are not talking about Eren anymore._ She'd had to physically cut him out of his titan shape the last time he'd shifted, and he had been slow to regenerate the limbs she'd had to leave behind in the titan's rapidly deteriorating form. It was that or let him be eaten by the titans that had swarmed him, though. Eren was distracted lately and hadn't made a good call when to shift.

"I hear your kill count is approaching Lance Corporal Levi's," Jean said, trying for conversational. His tone fell flat. Mortified, he tilted back his glass to drain the rest of his alcohol. "How many have you taken down alone now?"

"I don't remember."

Jean took that to mean _unofficially, I passed it a long time ago._ "Maybe it's time the Lance Corporal handed down the title of Humanity's Strongest Soldier to you."

"It doesn't matter to me."

"Right." Jean excused himself to refill his cup. When he returned, Mikasa had gone. Well, that was fine. He drained his cup in silence.

"Could I have a second, Squad Leader Jean?" This time, it was Armin.

"Come to congratulate me on my promotion or to rescind it?" Jean asked.

"If I was going to do either, I would choose the former and not the latter." Armin wasn't drinking either. "You earned that promotion." He trailed off, dropping his gaze to the cup in Jean's hand. "How many is that?"

"Two," Jean said.

"You will probably appreciate your judgment more in the morning if you stop at two," Armin said, then added, "I wanted to make sure you would be okay with your promotion."

"Why wouldn't I be okay with being promoted? I'm not going to stay some rookie forever," Jean growled.

"Because I was at Trost too, and you were the one who found Marco."

Jean thought that he was doing rather well, for how suddenly the top of his head seemed to have floated off. He felt dizzy and not quite all there. "What does Marco have to do with any of this?"

"Statistically," Armin said, "… statistically, not everyone under your command will make it back alive from a mission. We've trimmed the casualties down to ten percent instead of twenty, but that's still a lot of soldiers, and… well, everyone noticed when you changed your mind about joining the Military Police."

"And you think I'm going to fall apart when my squadmates get killed." He feels numb.

"No," Armin said. "I don't think you will. Not right away. But you haven't really moved on from Marco's death, have you?"

"I have," Jean insisted, free hand making an aborted motion towards his left breast pocket where the curve of bone rested.

"You haven't." Armin studied Jean's face, a little too intently. "Like Eren hasn't really recovered from losing his mom, and Mikasa won't let Eren out of her sight if she can do anything about it."

"He was my friend." The word didn't feel quite right. There was something missing from it, some nuance lost. Jean had never really been one for words. That had been Armin, and Marco too.

Armin exhaled slowly. "I'm not good at this like Marco was," he said. "But he was my friend too, and I have to look out for everyone. That's my job as strategic advisor.

"You'll probably have to make hard calls. You've already done that. You did it in Trost, even. I don't doubt your ability to lead. I wanted to make sure you understood that you can't do what you've been doing with Marco's memory for every soldier you lose. You'll go mad that way."

"You're still blaming yourself, aren't you Jean?" somebody asked.

"No," Jean said.

Armin blinked, briefly puzzled.

"It's time to move on, Jean," the someone said. "I don't want to be the thing that kills you in the end. Anything but that."

"That way lies madness," Armin insisted, quietly. "So I think you should try to talk with Commander Erwin and Lance Corporal Levi while they're both here. Tonight."

"Why tonight?"

"You won't have time tomorrow," Armin said.

"What did you and Marco used to talk about?" Jean asked, instead of _why would either the Lance Corporal or the Commander talk to me?_.

"Small things," Armin said. "We were maintaining our 3DMG's, so there wasn't much room for talk that was too complicated. Sometimes we checked each other's gear. He talked about home a little bit, and his family. It was that sort of thing."

"Oh."

"You, once."

"Really."

"I wondered why you were always picking fights with Eren and he said you found a lot of things to envy in Eren. Then he wondered why you thought you didn't have some of the same qualities you were jealous of him for."

Jean clamped his mouth shut to prevent the noise he'd made soft in his throat from escaping. "He was an idiot," he said, when he was sure he'd properly stifled it.

"He wasn't an idiot for seeing good things in you, Jean," Armin said, and left it at that.

It was probably the alcohol, Jean thought, and scrubbed furiously at his eyes until his sleeves were damp and the backs of his hands no longer came away wet.

-

"Hey, Squad Leader," Sasha said, five years after Trost. "Want a potato?"

The bare remnants of the 104th's members that had survived joining the Scouting Legion had been cobbled into a squad of its own. To be precise, Jean's squad. He wasn't sure if it was a blessing or a curse yet. They knew he was capable of leading them, at least. There wasn't any need to terrify or tease out their trust when they'd already seen the face of Hell with him.

"Raw, Sasha?"

"Nope!" she said. "Eren's been roasting them for us."

"Is he throwing off steam again?" Jean asked, pinching the bridge of his nose. "Tell him to knock it off, I said no fires and that means no titan vapor either."

"He's not steaming, though," Sasha said. "He might if he moves a lot, but we think he's asleep, and anyway he's warm enough to cook potatoes in his fingers. Eat one before you fall over, Squad Leader. Mikasa's wearing a scary look on her face."

"Fine." Jean took the potato, handling it gingerly. He nearly burnt his tongue on the first bite, but the hot food was encouraging after three days straight of cold trail rations. (Sasha has probably been sneaking food out of their supplies anyway; this hasn't changed in all the years he's known her.)

"Remember the first day, when we declared our reasons for joining the military?" someone said. "When that drill sergeant made her run for hours because of the potato she'd taken from the kitchen?"

Jean paused, mid-bite.

"What's the matter?" Sasha asked. "Stomach cramp?"

"It's nothing," he lied.

Tomorrow, they would move to a safe zone and let Eren shift back to human. They would set up a proper camp and guard him until Eren was well enough to travel again, and take the opportunity to replenish their supplies. Then they would resume travel at half-pace until Eren was well enough to shift and travel more quickly. They had a month left to reach their objective separate from the main force of the Scouting Legion.

If all went well, they would reach their destination with no casualties. If it didn't…

"If you don't eat your potato, Squad Leader, it's going to get cold."

Jean mechanically ate the rest of his potato. Sasha watched every bite, almost disappointed that he didn't leave a single crumb behind, and at last nodded and let him be.

"It's been a long time, hasn't it?" someone asked.

"Yeah," Jean said to the empty air and his quiescent horse. "It's been a long time." He fished out the curve of bone and the new polishing rag he'd made for it out of the wreck of his last shirt and ran the cloth over its surface. "A long time."

-

"I'm sorry," Jean choked out, six years from Trost. "I'm sorry." He didn't even have anything left of the woman's son to bring back. The 104th-only squad had disbanded and been shuffled into several squads as his peers from training had gained experience and been promoted. There were few enough remaining veterans as it was.

His squad had been composed of rookies and a quiet veteran with freckles, formerly under Lance Corporal Levi's command. When a deviant-type had appeared, Jean and the veteran hadn't reacted fast enough (complacent, Jean thought bitterly, we'd gotten _complacent_ ) to prevent two of the rookies from being eaten.

The remainder of his squad had fought well, but in the end he'd started with fourteen squad members and came back with eight.

"Did my son make a difference?" the woman asked, back straight, eyes red.

 _No_ , Jean thought. _I let him die because of my complacency. I let him die for_ nothing. "Yes," he lied. The words scratched their way out of his throat, hoarse and painful. "He served humanity admirably to the very end." He kept his back straight and rode on, and didn't collapse until he'd reached the stables of the legion's eastern branch and he could dismount on shaking legs.

"It wasn't your fault," someone said, tending his horse in the next stall. "You'll drive yourself mad if you torture yourself about everything that happens."

"They were my responsibility and I failed them," Jean growled. "I _let them die._ This is on my head."

"So then accept that responsibility, and carry it, but don't dwell on it," the someone said. "It will be your burden, in a position of leadership, but because you understand your burden you will make better choices and ensure that whatever sacrifices you must make in the future are necessary. Maybe you will learn to find the path that requires fewer sacrifices."

"How would you know, Marco? You _died_ six years ago!" Jean yelled around the lump in his throat. His horse whickered. "How can you tell me this when I didn't even notice you were missing? What right do I even have to lead anyone when I couldn't keep you alive?"

"… Squad Leader Kirschstein," the veteran said, quietly. "Are you all right?" His dark hair wasn't quite the same color, Jean realized belatedly.

"Gallagher," Jean said. He opened his mouth, closed it. Gallagher's cheekbones remained dusted with freckles in all the wrong places. How could have made _that_ mistake? "I…"

"If you are overtaxed by your position, you should request leave." Gallagher wore a perfectly neutral expression. "Your talents are useful and would be wasted should you be killed foolishly."

"That idiot was wrong when he said I would lead well," Jean muttered, and fished the bone out of his breast pocket. "I couldn't lead my way out of a half-rotten crate."

"If 'that idiot' refers to the Marco you were yelling at earlier, you do disservice to his memory by doubting the faith he placed in you. I am also to blame for our losses during this past mission. Self-pity isn't like you, Squad Leader."

"No. I guess not."

"You have a report to write," Gallagher said. "I'll take care of your horse. Go cool your head and write to Headquarters."

"It seems like you would do just fine leading the squad. Why was I put in charge of you?"

Gallagher shook his head. "Go on, Squad Leader. That report won't write itself. I'll give you my notes after dinner."

Jean replaced the bone in his jacket pocket and left the stables.

"It really wasn't your fault, Jean," someone said behind him, just outside the stable doors. Jean didn't turn around.

-

Seven years after Trost, Jean was at Headquarters when the report came that Connie Springer had fallen in the line of duty.

No voice came to say it hadn't been his fault. Jean knew it wasn't his fault. It still hurt, though. Connie had been a little ridiculous, but he had been one of the 104th. He wasn't supposed to die.

(Marco had died. So had Thomas, and Mina, and too many other people from the 104th. Just because he'd known them didn't mean things didn't happen. Didn't mean they would be safe from the titans.)

Three days later, the report of Sasha Braus' death reached Headquarters.

Armin grieved, and Jean poured out fingers of whiskey. He drank Armin's share too, when Armin wouldn't touch the stuff.

Commander Erwin sat down across from them in the officially designated mess hall, hands folded under his chin. He looked as tired as Jean felt.

"Sir," Jean asked, tongue loosened by the alcohol. "Does it ever get any easier?"

The commander's mouth tilted into a precarious, crooked smile. "No. It doesn't."

"How do you…" Armin cut himself off. He inhaled deeply, breathed out. "You've buried more friends than we have, haven't you sir?"

"It doesn't get easier. You bury them and make time to grieve. Then you pick up your blades and go out again, because if you stop they'll have died for nothing." Erwin's tone sharpened. "Don't waste your friends' deaths. Make what you can of them."

He uttered the last words looking squarely at Jean.

"Yes sir," Jean said.

-

"What is this?" Eren asked, eight years after Trost. They have some down time, and Lance Corporal Levi had apparently trained Eren well--he was _cleaning_.

More accurately, he was bundling dirty uniforms to be washed, and he'd picked up Jean's jacket and felt the hard curve in the left breast pocket.

Jean snatched the jacket and fished the bone out, wrapped in its latest polishing rag. "It's not any of your business, Jaeger." His tone was sharper than he'd meant it to be.

"That felt like a piece of rib," Eren said. "Why do you have a rib bone in your pocket? You're not like Sasha was, so it's not a bone to gnaw on after the meat's gone. Whose ribs did you break that off of?" he demanded.

"It's not any of your fucking business, Eren!" Jean snapped.

"What is going on here?" Mikasa asked, voice steely. She stood in the doorway of the room, arms crossed, but her eyes were fixed on Jean.

"Nothing," Eren said.

"Nothing," Jean muttered.

They waited until she left before Eren fixed suspicious eyes on Jean. "Did you kill someone? Is that a trophy?"

"Fuck you," Jean snarled. "Seriously. Fuck you."

Eren paused, gears grinding in his head, before going pale. "That's… is that Marco's?"

Jean said nothing.

"I knew it really hurt you when he died, but--" Eren set the laundry hamper down. "Jean, he's _dead_. Clinging onto a piece of him like that isn't going to bring him back. What if you've gotten him stuck here?"

"Stuck?"

Eren made a vague gesture. "It was… it was from one of Armin's books. When we were kids. If you took something from someone who'd died they wouldn't be able to move on. They'd be stuck here."

"What was that from, a fairy tale?"

Eren shifted uncomfortably. "Maybe. But somebody believed it enough to write it down."

"Sounds like it was just a kids' story to me," Jean said. Without thinking about it too hard, he'd started polishing the bone. Eren shuddered and grabbed Jean's jacket back, dropping it into the hamper.

"You need to let him go for real, Jean," he said. With that, he carried the hamper out the door.

"Like I'll take that advice from a guy who's still trying to make the titans pay for killing his mother," Jean muttered.

There was a thud from outside the room. Eren marched back in, hands conspicuously empty of the laundry hamper, and slugged Jean across the face. The impact knocked Jean on his ass.

"What the _fuck_ , Eren?"

"I'll let you off with one hit this time, because you're still so broken up about him that you've turned into a stupid asshole," Eren seethed. "You should've just said something to him while he was alive to turn your dumb face down." He stalked out the door again.

"Are you really stuck here?" Jean asked the empty air, but got no reply.

-

Nine years after Trost, the higher-ups promoted Mikasa to Lance Corporal. Jean wondered what had taken them so long.

He was the only one who drank to her that night. She didn't drink alcohol. Neither did Armin, so Jean took it upon himself to noisily raise a toast to her. She smiled, a little bit. That was good, Jean thought, and drank.

After several drinks, the world swayed a little. He took a walk around the old castle where the legion had decided to host the promotion banquet thinking to cool his head. Instead of wandering around in circles like he'd expected, he found himself on the roof, higher than he remembered judging it from the outside. Jean stared down the drop off the parapet and remembered only belatedly that it would probably kill him if he fell from that height. He wasn't wearing a 3DMG, and there was no one around who could bail him out if he lost his balance (which seemed increasingly likely, given that this was probably what they called drunk.)

"Don't," someone said, quietly.

Jean stepped up onto the parapet and continued to stare down the drop off the edge of the roof. He leaned forward a little to test his shaky balance.

"Jean, _don't_ ," the someone said, a little more urgently.

Jean teetered forward a little, and the next moment there was a hot-cold hand shoving him bodily backwards. He landed on his ass well away from the parapet, an arm's length from the stairwell opening. There was no one standing in front of him.

"And you called me an idiot," the someone said, sounding as if they were far away and somewhere close by all at once. "You're the idiot."

"Yeah, I am," Jean agreed. The voice fell silent and did not reply.

He stumbled back downstairs to the room he'd been given and fell asleep in his clothes.

(The alcohol headache he had in the morning was awful, but probably a lot better than he would have felt if he'd survived falling off the roof.)

-

Ten years after Trost, the curve of bone still rested in Jean's breast pocket. He took it out to polish it and trailed off, mid-stroke of the polishing cloth. The grief still surprised him sometimes, a festering ache instead of the raw hurt it had been when he'd found Marco ten years ago. The office felt too small, suddenly.

"You should move on, Jean," someone said, from somewhere behind his chair. Jean didn't turn around.

"I know."

"Then why haven't you?" the someone asked, not unkindly. It put Jean in mind of freckles and a warm smile, a bit melancholy.

"I can't. Not yet."

"But soon, I hope?" the someone said.

"Yeah," Jean lied. "Soon."

"Good," the someone said.

"Yeah."

Armin walked in with an armful of maps. "Deputy Commander Kirschstein," he said. "Strategy meeting. Can you carry the files the Reiss family gave us?"

"Yeah," Jean said. "The usual meeting room?"

"Yes."

"I'll be there in two minutes," Jean promised. Satisfied, Armin nodded and left; Jean put the curve of Marco's rib down on his desk and got up to rifle through the files, searching for the sheaf of folders marked with the emblem of the Reiss family and signed _Historia Reiss_ in a girlish hand. Jean stacked the document folders neatly and had nearly walked out the door of his office when he paused.

Then he doubled back to his desk and quietly slipped the bone back into the left breast pocket of his jacket, patting it gently to reassure himself that it was there. He closed the door of his office behind him with a soft click.


End file.
